Who is more ultra, Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis? Nobody would have said it, but now it turns out that the former president of the United States, the most extremist of recent times, chooses to play the card of a pretended moderation – very relative – to attack what is emerging as his main rival in the primaries for the 2024 presidential elections: the undoubtedly radical ultra-conservative governor of Florida.
“Ron DeSantis loves to stick his fingers where he shouldn’t, and we’re not just talking about pudding,” says a voiceover in a Trump campaign ad as a twenty-something man sticks his hand in a chocolate terrine. “DeSantis – says the narrator – has put his finger on the rights of the elderly to cut Social Security and Medicare, and even to raise the retirement age.”
The Republican leader’s propaganda ad refers to old anti-social DeSantis proposals that Trump himself was never far from … until a few months ago when he decided that neither he nor his party were comfortable with it, obviously because they would lose votes.
But there are many other ways in which DeSantis’ ultra-conservative maximalism may alienate him from independent voters, but in principle inclined to vote Republican, as many donors and campaign strategists already fear.
In recent weeks, the governor of the state of the sun has signed a law that prohibits abortion after 6 weeks of pregnancy – in the face of the 15-week deadline that ruled until now – and extended to all school grades the veto to teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity, so that the ban it established last year for students aged 5 to 9, in the so-called “Don’t say gay” law, now extends to 18-year-olds .
In view of the apparent success among Republicans of the latest measure against what the right calls the woke ideology (a term that associates “awakening” with progressivism), the majority rejection of the US society’s prohibitions and restrictions on abortion may hurt DeSantis’ aspirations to unseat Trump as a candidate in the 2024 election.
Republican super-donor Ken Langone, who has expressed his preference for the Florida politician and rejection of Trump’s re-election, confessed to The Washington Post on Wednesday that he is concerned about DeSantis’ drifting further and further into extremism. “It wouldn’t be surprising if he was a little more conciliatory”, he said. And he added that he is “very frightened” by the dominance of the former president in the polls in the run-up to 2024.
But there is another war that at this moment may be wearing DeSantis as much or more than the ones he is waging in the strict battlefield of politics, and it is the one he is fighting with the Disney company. Genesis is precisely the law Don’t say gay. The entertainment giant’s executives criticized her, and he responded: “If Disney wants to fight, it picked the wrong guy.” And he proposed to put an end to the special statute that since 1967 allowed the “dream factory” to act as a local government in the vast area where it installed its Walt Disney World more than half a century ago.
The governor replaced the corporate board of the company with another appointed by the state institutions under his control. But Disney, far from folding its arms, previously approved certain “development” measures that would limit the power of the new board over the coming decades. On Monday, DeSantis announced a fierce counterattack against possible tax hikes, not ruling out the creation of another park to compete with Mickey Mouse and even the construction of a prison near the Magic Kingdom.
Not only Donald Trump, but other potential contenders for next year’s election quickly moved against DeSantis for the attack on the cartoon and movie giant. The former president once again belittled his colleague with a bad name. But from the appellation of “sanctimonious” or altar gnawing that he dedicated months ago to a simple saint, also in Latin, to say, on Tuesday on his network, Truth Social: “DeSanctus is being absolutely destroyed by Disney” .
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, another Republican considering a 2024 run, said: “Given his actions toward Disney, I don’t think Ron DeSantis is a conservative.” “Where are we going if when you express your disagreement in this country the Government punishes you? I thought this was what the left was doing, and now we see that a Republican is doing it,” he added.
And the governor of New Hampshire and equally possible candidate, Chris Sununu, also criticized his colleague’s obsession with Disney: “This has become a problem for our party”, he opined.
The fratricidal war is being used in the Republican campaign in the next presidential elections. Democrats have fun while warming up on the sidelines.
